A Little More Whiteness, Please

[rj]

Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net>:
> 
> Whiteness has also of course its opposite (derived) biblical
> connotation--camouflage for corruption and death and by extension Sin, as
> in whited sepulcher. 

And, of course, this is part of the primary parodic opposition in *GR*.
Whiteness is the white Christian colonialist's xenophobic cure for and
blind against primitive, animalistic blackness. 

A Narrator:
"Well, there's one place where Shit'n'Shinola do come together, and
that's in the men's toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop
departed from on this trip down the toilet .... Shit, now is the color
white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some
abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse
itself inside the whiteman's warm and private own *asshole*, which is
getting pretty intimate. That's what the white toilet's for. You see
many brown toilets? Nope, toilets the color of gravestones, classical
columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain's the very emblem of
Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the
color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's in the toilet slappin' on the
Shinola, working off whiteman's penance on his sin of being born the
color of Shit'n'Shinola." (688)

The faeces of modern white Western capitalist Protestant technocratic
society are a constant reminder of this "sin" of blackness. Organic
detritus repels, whilst inanimate and manufactured "waste" products --
all manner of bleaches both human, chemical and metaphysical -- are
revered, and become the very emblems of that society. The Herero, the
African-American, King Kong, the Schwarzgerat, Shit, Death: these all
must be denied, stamped out, flushed away, at all costs, in order to
preserve this society and its principles.

Elsewhere, buggerised Gottfried is "consecrated to shit". He finally
recognises and understands Blicero's gift of love, and the paraphernalia
of sadistic perversion has "all become theatre as he approached the
gates of the Other Kingdom, felt the white gigantic muzzles somewhere
inside, expressionless beasts frozen white, pushing him  away, the crust
and mantle hum of mystery so beyond his poor hearing . . . (721-2).
Pudding's sacrament from his Madonna of the Night is another such
example of this approach to the gates of the "Other Kingdom" (i.e.
Death/Truth), as also with Slothrop in the Roseland bowl, the Toiletship
Rucksichtslos &c. 

Whiteness must be taken to its extreme so that its antiseptic artifices
can be effaced. The darker Truths will be revealed, resounding in the
pristine silence. 

Another Narrator:
"There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys
taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes,
to the final walls of ice. Our judgement lapsed, fatally: we paid more
attention to the Pearys and Nansenso who returned -- and worse, we named
what they did "success", though they failed. Because they came back,
back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin
and Salomon Andree: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the
poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we
had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over
all ability to know victory or defeat.
     What did Andree find in the polar silence? What should we have
heard?" (589)

best